Engelstalige surveillance lectuur: de oogst van 2014

Tim Maly & Emily Horne: The Inspection House. An Impertinent Field Guide to Modern Surveillance (Coach House Books / reeks Exploded Views, 2014, 160 p.)
In 1787, Jeremy Bentham conceived of the panopticon, a ring of cells observed by a central watchtower, as a labor-saving device for those in authority. While Bentham’s design was ostensibly for a prison, he believed that any number of places that require supervision — factories, poorhouses, hospitals, and schools — would benefit from such a design. The French philosopher Michel Foucault took Bentham at his word. In his groundbreaking 1975 study, Discipline and Punish, the panopticon became a metaphor to describe the creeping effects of personalized surveillance as a means for ever-finer mechanisms of control.
Forty years later, the available tools of scrutiny, supervision, and discipline are far more capable and insidious than Foucault dreamed, and yet less effective than Bentham hoped. Shopping malls, container ports, terrorist holding cells, and social networks all bristle with cameras, sensors, and trackers. But, crucially, they are also rife with resistance and prime opportunities for revolution. The Inspection House is a tour through several of these sites — from Guantánamo Bay to the Occupy Oakland camp and the authors’ own mobile devices — providing a stark, vivid portrait of our contemporary surveillance state and its opponents.

Gabriella Coleman: Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso Books, 2014)
Volgens de flaptekst “the ultimate book on the worldwide movement of hackers, pranksters, and activists that operates under the non-name Anonymous” en deze keer heeft de flaptekst overschot van gelijk. Antropoloog Gabriella Coleman schreef een fascinerend boek over hackerscollectief Anonymous, wellicht wel de meest interessante politieke beweging van de afgelopen tien jaar. Coleman volgde de club vanaf het begin en slaagt erin de vele gezichten van Anonymous te laten zien. Het resultaat is een rijk portret en een spannend verhaal dat de beweging een gezicht geeft zonder aan het masker te tornen. Essential reading.“Half a dozen years ago, anthropologist Gabriella Coleman set out to study the rise of this global phenomenon just as some of its members were turning to political protest and dangerous disruption (before Anonymous shot to fame as a key player in the battles over WikiLeaks, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street). She ended up becoming so closely connected to Anonymous that the tricky story of her inside-outside status as Anon confidante, interpreter, and erstwhile mouthpiece forms one of the themes of this witty and entirely engrossing book.”
Recensie bij Vrij Nederland, de Correspondent, The Guardian.

Kees Boersma, Rosamunde Van Brakel, Chiara Fonio and Peter Wagennaar: Histories of State Surveillance in Europe and Beyond, Routledge, London/New York, 2014.Does the development of new technology cause an increase in the level of surveillance used by central government? Is the growth in surveillance merely a reaction to terrorism, or a solution to crime control? Are there more structural roots for the increase in surveillance?
This book attempts to find some answers to these questions by examining how governments have increased their use of surveillance technology. Focusing on a range of countries in Europe and beyond, this book demonstrates how government penetration into private citizens’ lives was developing years before the ‘war on terrorism.’ It also aims to answer the question of whether central government actually has penetrated ever deeper into the lives of private citizens in various countries inside and outside of Europe, and whether citizens are protected against it, or have fought back.
The main focus of the volume is on how surveillance has shaped the relationship between the citizen and the State. The contributors and editors of the volume look into the question of how central government came to intrude on citizens’ private lives from two perspectives: identification card systems and surveillance in post-authoritarian societies. Their aim is to present the heterogeneity of the European historical surveillance past in the hope that this might shed light on current trends.
Je kan het boek integraal lezen bij Cryptome (pdf)